Leaving

Now that we’ve segued through Thanksgiving, on with the story: I don’t think it ever really HIT me that we were leaving Latvia. We just built this house, our lives were comfortable, we knew how to manage living there, and life there seemed to just get better and better. It all happened so fast, though, and there was so much to do, I never really had time to process it.

We had a month before my husband started his new job in Chicago, and we were still on vacation in Florida! He had to resign from his current job, we had to figure out how to get a shipping container to move from Latvia to Chicago, figure out where we were going to live in Chicago, figure out what to do with our house and car and other things we couldn’t/didn’t want to take with us, get medical records and vital documents in order, I had to tie up loose ends of projects I was involved in, say our goodbyes, the list went on and on and there simply wasn’t time to ponder anything. We just had to do it.

That month was one of the scariest, busiest and most surreal times in my life. Nothing about it felt right, but there was little I could do to argue the plan. The String of Tension had apparently thickened its hold again, and cooperation and infallible union seemed to me to be the only remedy for easing it.